


what comes after

by charcoalsuns



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Gen, quiet library conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-02 02:24:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19190014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoalsuns/pseuds/charcoalsuns
Summary: In which Daichi, following the end of Spring High, is still figuring out where to put his feet.(He is in good company.)





	what comes after

**Author's Note:**

  * For [strikinglight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/gifts).



> for meg, with much gratitude for your being. 
> 
> this scene was grown from a prompt you kindly gave me about, um, two years ago, and has become something sturdy and green. 
> 
> i hope you enjoy it <3

  


It’s the first truly warm day of the new year, and Daichi has no opinion on it because he’s stuck in the library, again, and the temperature of the library never seems to match whatever might be happening in the atmosphere outside. He scrubs his palm across the part of his hair that always grows faster than the rest, trying to ignore the itch through sheer force of will. 

Unfortunately, he’s already allocated too much of his willpower toward simply staying in his seat here, toward keeping his mind focused on his piles of reviews and notes and texts. He doesn’t have any left to stop himself from scratching at the back of his neck like a dog. 

_No Pets Allowed_ , informs the unwritten sign outside the library door, and he stifles a laugh just in time. 

He needs to get more sleep tonight. 

Before Daichi can submerge himself back into his studying, a muffled clatter carries through the open window, prolonged enough that he places its source before he looks – a floor down and now a building away, a group dressed in matching practice gear runs to the beat of their captain’s call. 

_Karasuno_ , she shouts, rallying them behind her quick, sure steps. _Fight!_

Their cleats strike against the pavement like they aren’t supposed to, but they’re soon back on the grass, soon back to their dust-packed fields, soon out of sight of anyone who would frown otherwise. 

Daichi catches the start of a reprimand in his throat, absurd and uncalled for. He misses the moment it gives way to a stinging, very real desire to echo with a shout of his own. 

_Karasuno_ , he remembers. _Fight!_

He stares down at the cleared pavement, unseeing, itch forgotten beneath one greater, dearer, one he cannot reach. He’s holding a pencil; he doesn’t remember what he’d been writing. 

He’d cried, of course, the day they lost, the day they left. Less on the latter, but he’d nonetheless caught Suga blinking more than necessary, and Shimizu had excused herself before he could ask them all if they wanted to get pork buns, his treat, for one unspoken last time. It turned out Asahi wasn’t the only one who could get sentimental. Daichi, though, would maintain that _his_ bout was under duress of too many extreme emotions crammed into too short a time. 

It’s taken until now, until the fleeting presence of a different team, a window, a world away, for that pressurized tension to release. It’s taken until now for him to realize there was any pressure building up in there to begin with. 

And yet, upon that release, he feels like he needs to will himself to breathe properly – despite the unexpectedly warm breeze from outside, that only stirs up this unseasonal nostalgia. 

He isn’t old enough to feel this way, surely. He’s never had a ceiling press down on his head like he’s reached the top of a staircase with no landing in sight. There’s always been somewhere higher to go. But now that the path he’d always set his direction by has been cut off, Daichi no longer knows where to aim. 

Well, pragmatically, he does. He’s stuck in the library for a singular purpose, and with entrance exams mere weeks away, with hours upon hours of studying to make up for, he doesn’t have energy to spare in facing elsewhere. But even if, all the way back in June, he had sworn he wouldn’t regret his decision to stay – there is regret in him today, and it rings of a different nature entirely. 

It feels _wrong_ , to be sitting at a table strewn with open books when there is not a drop of rain in the afternoon outside. 

It feels wrong to be so aware of the time that the hands on the clock on the library wall hardly seem to move. It feels wrong to take in a breath through his nose and know, as sure as a crash to the head, that he no longer has cause to let it build into a shout from his chest, that he no longer has anyone to direct or lead or guide, except for his own self. 

He wonders if he’ll ever play volleyball again. And he’s being dramatic, he knows he is, but that knowledge doesn’t stop his forehead from creasing under his fingers, doesn’t stop his breaths from whispering too fast into the quiet of the library’s reference section. 

He allows himself five minutes to feel like he wants to yell and flail around uselessly. 

During the fourth minute – and why is it that now, the clock’s hands seem to glide faster than normal – during the fourth minute, someone pulls out the chair across from him and flops down like the table is a giant pillow. 

Suga leans into his field of vision, forearms nudging the edges of a history text. 

He looks hard at Daichi, somehow managing to squint suspiciously through wide-open eyes, and seems to read something printed in the defensive curl of Daichi’s shoulders. 

“Come on, Daichi,” he laughs, in a low voice that doesn’t disturb anyone else who’s scattered across the other tables. “Don’t go looking so down! You’re going to do fine.” 

Ah. 

Somehow, Daichi had thought he was being completely transparent, with the window open beside him like a forbidden box of cookies, and crumbs of mindless doodles in the margins of his notes. He’d braced himself for Suga’s unsoftened verdict. But instead, it seems, somewhere along the way, a few of their priorities have shifted. He hadn’t been thinking about their exams at all. 

He’s so deep into not thinking about their exams that he forgets to respond to Suga, and it takes a jolt of a kick to his calf beneath the table to remind him he doesn’t need to be thinking – or not thinking – on his own. 

“I feel kind of weird,” he says. Abrupt, it sticks in his teeth like a confession. “It’s been, how long, exactly? And it’s only hitting me now that I’m not part of the team anymore.” 

Suga looks surprised. Then he doesn’t, and his tone sounds far from teasing when he says, “Well, good. Then we can feel weird together, huh?” 

If Daichi recalls their recent past, actually, Suga’s voice has been absent of teasing for a while. He guesses this, this shared weirdness of theirs is why. 

“It seems selfish to want to play even longer.” Daichi finds his fingertips reaching once more for the scratchy middle ground at the top of his neck. Too short to cut away, too long to have just been snipped off. “We got so far. Why doesn’t it feel like I can be satisfied?” 

Suga hums. Looks like he’s considering a smile, then like he’s not feeling it, under the weight of one gravity or another. “You know why I’m here, Daichi?” He doesn’t pause for an answer. “I was leaving the school, but I ended up going the opposite way, and when I realized where I was headed I turned myself around to find somewhere to clear my head.” 

“You… were going to the gym?” 

He nods. “I gotta say, you right now are not the fresh breeze I was hoping to find, Daichi.” 

That draws a snort from Daichi’s throat; he pretends he can’t tell how much of it was about to become a frustrated cry. “Cut me a break,” he says, “I’m neck-deep in reviews, all right.” 

“So should I,” Suga returns, shrugging as carefree as he isn’t. He holds his eyes on Daichi’s, the only movement their unblinking flicker from one side to the other. “We can’t go back,” he says. “It’s not a matter of being selfish or not, not this time. You know that, too.” 

Daichi knows. It doesn’t stop him from dragging his feet, like the child few have ever believed he could be. “I saw Shimizu in the hallway the other day,” he says. “It’s ridiculous, but for a moment I wondered if she’d recognize me.” 

Delight rings briefly across the table, before Suga catches himself with a hand over the lower half of his face, glancing around in apology. He doesn’t quite _look_ apologetic, though, and anyway, although no one seems to notice them, Daichi has the feeling that he and Suga will be leaving the vicinity soon. 

“She did, by the way, thanks for the sympathy.” 

Suga moves as if to punch him, but his ribs hit the edge of the table before he can reach Daichi’s shoulder, or chest, or lungs, and he settles for another kick, to save face. “Why wouldn’t she!” he laughs. “We didn’t only see each other in the gym. Or am I imagining the last three years?” 

Daichi shakes his head. He might be feeling a little less itchy, now. Steady enough to ask, “Do you have any regrets?” He winces. “Or, I mean, maybe that’s too heavy a word for this. Things you wish could’ve gone different. Like you did back in June, after we beat Datekou.” 

“Hey.” Suga points at him. “That wasn’t meant to leave that day, remember?” 

“Actually, you said to keep it between us, and—” 

“I did not! I definitely said to keep it in the moment I let it slip out, and anyway.” He huffs, sobering again as he considers Daichi’s question. And the fact that he does consider – well, Daichi feels steady. “No… No. Not like back in June. I grabbed every opportunity I could; nothing could have been more fitting, for all of us. But… Well, there was…” 

“Suga,” Daichi says. “That’s not the kind I’m talking about.” 

He opens his mouth as if to deny it, or just to be contrary – then closes it, as if he’s remembered why he’s here in the first place. “I,” he starts, and makes a face. “I wasn’t prepared to leave. How could I have been, you know? It would’ve been like being prepared to lose. And now, again, all that’s left is to get stronger.” 

_Get stronger_. 

The words echo in Daichi’s mind like a cheer from another court, like the remnants of tears in his bowl of rice. They hadn’t been given the same speech, but the sentiment had been resurrected for sure, and had been made all the harder to swallow because they knew – four of them knew – they weren’t entirely included in this one’s call for potential. 

“It’s just,” Suga says. “We’ll have to do it elsewhere.” 

Daichi scrunches up his mouth, tells himself it’s a smile. Neither of them believe it. “I don’t feel ready,” he says, wondering at how easily the admission comes, and adds, “I know _they_ are,” even though that’s not the uncertainty at hand in the slightest. 

Suga looks at him. He doesn’t say anything, but there is a twist to his mouth that tells Daichi he hears him, and an intensity in his eyes that means he sees him, uncertainty and all. 

Then he tilts his face up, nose pointed toward the bars of fluorescent light overhead. He breathes in hard, as if there’s a scent there he wants to keep. “It’s weird enough not to be there.” He looks back over at Daichi, a grin pulled onto his face like a well-worn sweater. “It’s enough of a downer, so let’s not make it feel worse by lingering on it, eh, _ex-captain?_ ” 

“Ouch,” Daichi says, but he can’t help but smile, too, a true one this time, and the faint wind through the window passes over them as though it had been waiting for their conversation to end. “I’m just about done here for today, want to get something to eat?” 

“Hmm… Your treat?” 

Daichi shrugs, spring on his tongue. “Yeah,” he concedes. “Sure thing.” 

Suga pumps a fist and lets out a mostly-silent cheer, as if he could have expected any other answer. “Great! I’m gonna text Asahi, too, all right?” His phone’s in his hand before Daichi can nod in glad agreement. 

At least some part of Suga is probably still looking for a distraction. But he’s not alone in that, and Daichi is heartened to know that neither of them will be left to their own devices, or to soak in introspection until they prune. 

As he sorts out his piles of notes, he wonders if he should get a package of those sour candies Shimizu likes. He could have them at hand the next time they meet in the hallway – or, maybe, he could try seeking her out after school instead. It seems a rather insufficient supplement to a _thank you_ he never quite gave, but he hopes she will understand. 

And as he packs his books back into his bag, Daichi permits one last thought regarding the wrongness of the afternoon. Namely, that since it’s not something he can correct in himself, it’s something he will have to live with, until it no longer feels wrong. 

It’s a cloudless day. The downhill walk away from school will be bright and newly warm. The fact of that, and of those he can still share it with, feels right enough for now.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! ;v;


End file.
